Douglas Preston - Riptide

"Don't touch him," he said, twitching the pistol warningly. "We're going in there."

Bonterre looked over. The bridge from the ladder array to the Wopner tunnel was trembling. As she stared, there came another violent shudder. The emergency lighting went out and the web of struts plunged into darkness.

"Move it," Streeter hissed in her ear.

Then he stopped. Even in the darkness, Bonterre could feel him tense.

Then she saw it, too: a faint light below them, rising quickly up the ladder.

"Captain Neidelman?" Streeter called down. There was no answer.

"Is that you, Captain?" he called again, louder, trying to make his voice heard over the thundering roar welling up from below.

The light kept coming. Now Bonterre could see it was pointed downward, its brightness obscuring the climbing figure.

"You down there!" Streeter called. "Show your face or I'll shoot!"

A muffled voice came up, faint and unintelligible.

"Captain?"

The light came closer, perhaps twenty feet below now. Then it snapped off.

"Christ," Streeter said again, bracing himself against the shaking platform, planting his legs apart and aiming downward, both hands on the gun. "Whoever it is," he roared, "I'm going to—" But even as he spoke there was a sudden rush from the other side of the platform. Taken by surprise, Streeter spun around and fired, and in the flare of the muzzle Bonterre could see Hatch, slamming his fist into Streeter's gut.

Hatch followed the blow to Streeter's abdomen with a straight-arm to the jaw. Streeter staggered backward on the metal platform and Hatch came quickly after, catching a handful of Streeter's shirt and spinning him around. Streeter began to twist from Hatch's grip and Hatch pulled him forward, punching him twice, hard, in the face. On the second blow, there was a low crunching noise as Streeter's sinuses gave way with a splatter of mucus and hot, thick blood.

Streeter moaned and went limp, and Hatch relaxed his grip. Suddenly, Streeter's knee came up. Grunting in surprise and pain, Hatch fell backward. Streeter went for his gun. There was nothing he could do but shove the man, hard, toward the floor.

Streeter lifted his gun as Hatch dove for the far side of the array. There was a roar and a burst of light, and a bullet sparked off a titanium member to his left. Hatch ducked to one side, swinging around as another bullet whined between the braces. Then Hatch heard a gasp and a low grunt: Bonterre was grappling Streeter from behind. He lunged forward just as Streeter gave her a brutal backhand that sent her spinning toward the mouth of the tunnel. Quick as a cat, Streeter brought the gun forward again. Hatch froze, his fist hanging in midair, staring at the dim line of the gunbarrel. Streeter looked into his eyes and smiled, blood from his nose staining his teeth a dull crimson.

Then he lurched to one side: Rankin, unable to use his hands, had risen up and was butting Streeter toward the edge of the metal bridge with his body. For a moment, Streeter seemed on the verge of toppling. But he regained his balance and, as Hatch brought his arm back for a blow, turned the gun on Rankin and fired point-blank.

The geologist's head jerked back, a dark spray rising behind in the gloom of the tunnel. Then he slumped to the metal flooring.

But Hatch's fist was already in motion, connecting heavily with Streeter's jaw even as he wheeled backward. Streeter staggered heavily against the railing and there was a protest of metal. Instantly, Hatch stepped forward, shoving hard with both hands. The railing gave as Streeter sagged back. He toppled into space, scrabbling frantically for a purchase. There was a gasp of surprise or pain; the crack of a pistol shot; the sickening sound of meat smacking metal. Then, more distantly, a splash that merged with the general rush of water far below.

The entire fight had lasted less than a minute.

Hatch rose to his feet, gasping from the exertion. He walked over to the inert form of Rankin, Bonterre already at the geologist's side. A single flash of livid lightning, reflected down through the tracery of struts, made it all too clear there was nothing he could do.

There was a grunt; the flashlight beam flared wildly; then Woody Clay heaved himself up onto the hundred-foot platform, sweat and dried blood mixing on his face. He had come up from below slowly, as a decoy, while Hatch had clambered quickly up the back side of the array to surprise Streeter.

Hatch was crushing Bonterre to him, his hands in the tangle of her dark hair. "Thank God," he breathed. "Thank God. I thought you were dead."

Clay watched them for a moment. "I saw something fall past me," he said. "Were those gunshots?"

Hatch's answer was interrupted by a sudden crash. Moments later, a large titanium spar came hurtling past them, raising fierce clangs as it bounced downward. The entire array quivered along its 150-foot length. Hatch pushed Bonterre and Clay across the shaking metal bridge into the nearby tunnel.

"What the hell's going on?" he panted.

"Gerard has opened the casket," Bonterre said. "He's set off the final trap."

Chapter 59

Neidelman watched, paralyzed with shock, as a series of violent tremors shook the treasure chamber. Another sickening lurch, and the floor canted farther to the right. Magnusen, who had been thrown against the far wall by the first jolt, now lay partly buried in a great mass of coins, thrashing and clawing, crying out in an otherworldly voice. The chamber lurched again and a row of casks toppled over, bursting in a rotten spray of wood, filling the air with gold and jewels.

The shifting of the casket beneath him shook Neidelman from his paralysis. He shoved the sword into his harness and looked about for his dangling lifeline. There it was, just above him, rising through the hole in the top of the treasure chamber. Far above, he could make out the thin glow of emergency lights at the base of the ladder array. As he watched, they winked out briefly, then flickered into life once again. He reached for the lifeline just as another terrible lurch came.

Suddenly there was a screech of tearing iron as the seam along the far edge of the floor split open. Neidelman watched in horror as the masses of loose gold slid toward the open seam, piling up against it, whirlpooling like water in a bathtub drain, pouring through the widening crack into a stormy black gulf below.

"No, no!" Magnusen cried, scrabbling through the hemorrhaging flow of treasure, even at this desperate extreme hugging and grasping the gold to her, caught between saving the coins and saving herself. A shudder that seemed to come from the center of the earth twisted the chamber, and a hailstorm of golden ingots buried themselves in the masses of coin around her. As the weight of the gold became greater and the whirlpool faster, Magnusen was sucked into the flow and pulled along toward the widening crack, her cries of no, no, no almost drowned by the roar of metal. She wordlessly stretched her arms toward Neidelman, eyes popping as her body was compressed by the weight of the gold. The vault echoed with the groan of buckling iron and the snapping of bolts.

And then Magnusen disappeared, sucked into the shimmering golden stream and down into the void.

Abandoning the lifeline, Neidelman scrambled up the shifting pile of gold and managed to grasp the swinging metal bucket. Reaching inside, he punched a button in the electrical box. The winch whined and the bucket began to ascend, Neidelman hanging beneath as the bucket scraped along the crazily angled roof of the iron vault before sliding up through the narrow cut.

As he slowly ascended the excavation toward the base of the ladder array, Neidelman hoisted himself into the bucket and glanced over its lip. He caught the last glimpse of a vast quantity of treasure—tusks, bolts of rotten silk, kegs, bags, gold, gems— vanishing in a great rattling rush through the crack in the treasure chamber below. Then the light, swinging wildly on its cord, smashed against the iron wall and was extinguished. The entire shaft went dark, lit only by the emergency lights from the array above his head. In the gloom, he saw—or thought he saw—the mangled treasure vault break free of the walls of the Pit and drop downward into a swirling chaos of water, sucked under with a final groan of iron.